No Right to Crow Down Here

For yesterday’s post, I had to look up the online BCP from my diocese’s website. The banner image says it all; the summary of the  Resources at an ACNA parishioner’s disposal.

Sure, that’s you looking up to one female in a dog collar and a bunch of wizened, short-haired crones positioned before apathetic men, but don’t worry: No female bishops. We believe in the Bible, tradition, and the Mysteries.

Jesus, deliver me!

(Edit: Moose Norseman points out this is not actually my diocese. It only looks like it.)

A Good Friday Anthem

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you,

because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

If we have died with him, we shall also live with him;
if we endure, we shall also reign with him.

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you,
because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

---

~ Good Friday Anthem 2, from The Book of Common Prayer

I Know I Feel Better About It

DrudgeReport asks, “Pope Declares No Hell?” and links to an article from CNSNews which reports an exchange with Italian reporter Eugenio Scalfari and Pope Francis:

Scalfari says to the Pope, “Your Holiness, in our previous meeting you told me that our species will disappear in a certain moment and that God, still out of his creative force, will create new species. You have never spoken to me about the souls who died in sin and will go to hell to suffer it for eternity. You have however spoken to me of good souls, admitted to the contemplation of God. But what about bad souls? Where are they punished?”

Pope Francis says,  “They are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”

Not to worry! Today the Vatican released a statement to quell rumors of heresy by the Pope:

“The Holy Father Francis recently received the founder of the newspaper La Repubblica in a private meeting on the occasion of Easter, without however giving him any interviews. What is reported by the author in today’s article [in La Repubblica] is the result of his reconstruction, in which the textual words pronounced by the Pope are not quoted. No quotation of the aforementioned article must therefore be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father.”

Translation: Whatever Pope Francis said was muttered during a question and answer chat with a reporter; not an interview, you see. Therefore you don’t know Pope Francis actually said what the reporter claims he said.

Well…there you have it.

 

The Authoritative and Auditory Almighty

Thanks to the men over at Social Matter eZine for linking a couple of my posts in their round-up: This Week in Reaction.

Much more important than my posts is an article they linked by W.M. Brigg, “Lee Strobel Asks, ‘Are Miracles Real and Still Happening?’“. Read it, and don’t miss the YouTube clip of a pastor named Duane Miller as he recovers his voice in the twinkling of an eye. I have never heard of Miller before. I pray he uses his blessing for good and God’s Kingdom.

Go read it, and then come back. I got all day, man.

So there is another story about a woman in the Mayo Clinic who was healed in a flash. The article is about the miracles themselves, but it contains a witness that I love to hear:

 

Strobel showed a video clip of Snyder. She said she was lying in hospice when “all of a sudden I heard a booming loud authoritative voice, ‘My child, get up and walk!’”

 

When God spoke to her she really heard it; like she would hear any other voice. It boomed. She didn’t have a feeling. She didn’t interpret her own musings as God speaking to her. She heard a voice. Then God’s majesty and power was witnessed by others.

Anything else is a con or delusion.

Anything Without a Head is Either Dead or a Monster

I am for fathers and fatherhood. That does not mean I am for any father for me, or for my kids. Nor am I for just anyone fathering, or claiming fatherhood. No one questions this. Everyone not an SJW understands it.

Likewise: Just because I am for authoritarianism, and just because I believe that authoritarianism is the reality of all political arrangements, and just because I see that it has been hidden under a garbage heap of lies in a contextual-less world of a long-overthrown and subjugated Europe: It does not follow that I am for just any kind of authoritarianism, or just any authoritarian. I’m not. I want good ones. We need them if we are going to defeat the post-modernists, cultural marxists, BLM, AntiFa, and the rest of the Eloist-Morlockian Alliance that Rules our Necropolis. What they have going for them, which we do not, are leaders. We don’t have leaders because the few with the gumption lack the resources. Those with the resources lack the gumption. And both can see that most of us aren’t worth leading since we categorically refuse to be under authority on the basis of a glamor of liberty which we do not actually possess. Above all, those with the gumption and resources do not themselves disbelieve the spell.

Whatever can’t go on forever, won’t; so the saying goes. But the things with a head go on longer, and get more done. Without a head, a thing can’t even make plans for the day. Two-headed bodies are either tragedies or abominations.

Security Conference Seduction

Last Thursday the sun shone, the air was warm, and the apartment complex pool next to the sand volleyball court was clean. Swarmed in this space were a hundred or more men and women; college students with the day off. Nearly all the men had taken off their shirts. Most of the women wore bikinis. Each had a can or bottle of something, and they all laughed and touched and mooned. Trap boomed and screeched from overdriven speakers. To the untrained eye, it was something like a bacchanalian scene. But I–having been raised in church–knew that I witnessed the dark ritual seduction of innocent females seeking security.

The men faked good humor while the music hypnotized the women with its subtle lyrics of fornication and riches. They only did so because it was expected of them by the prospective papas at this impromptu security conference. The bumping propaganda lulled the women, and by this clever hypnosis and other unseen trickery the young men coerced the women to rub their bodies upon their oppressors. They only hung on the predators–as if each were a jungle gym–to see which man was strong enough to give a paternal hug, or some day hand his little girl an ice cream cone.

And so what about the beverages? What recourse had the poor, nearly naked, dears from this nightmare but to drink? How else to quell their fears of remaining unloved for who they were on the inside, or to drown their sorrows for having to pick from such a poor selection of future fathers who could not even manage a shirt?

Those women didn’t mean to wear bikinis around a bunch of sex-minded men instead of their dads. It was just bad luck.

Or, How I Learned to Love the Boss

This is a dashed-off list of the main 10 thoughts that led me to recognize the sweet, sentimental affection for freedom I have inside me, reach deep down in there, and start choking that bitch out.

• Zippy Catholic, in particular his idea of the “unprincipled exception”: rules and ruling that do not proceed from the principle of liberty, but from something else, like “good”, or “just”. As well as being repeatedly confronted with the idea that I find it preferable to have a “free government” over a “good government”. That is just dumb.

 

• Thinking about the Men’s Sphere complaint of the conservative formulation of familial headship–authority is responsibility but no command–is not true authority.

 

• The interchangeability of the words: power, liberty, command, freedom, etc. We play subtle but corrosive games with these words. We think we understand each other, but I doubt it.

 

• Taking stock of what few freedoms I actually have (in contrast to the things that are restricted from me), and how I’m mostly ok with that. My problem isn’t a lack of freedom. My problem is that I can’t count on my authorities to uphold me in justice when I make a good decision.

 

• Martial Law. When things get bad, real bad, so bad that we have to resort to violence, we enact martial law. That is, we become overtly authoritarian. Obviously then we think that is the best, must-have form of government. And that means that everything else is half-ass measures. We’re playing shadow games here with liberalism.

 

• The Kingdom of God. I must admit that the government the Lord chooses is the best, wisest, and most just kind of government.

 

• Contemplating “Alt-Right”. As a lifelong member of GenX, Alt-Right is a gay term. It reminds me of Third Eye Blind’s “pierced queer teens in cyberspace”. I don’t want an alternative right. I want the good right. I want the just right. And I want a legitimate place in it, with authority over my own domain. I don’t want to be free to own a weapon. I want to be authorized–expected–to be armed.

 

• Recognition that love for authority doesn’t mean all authorities are to be loved. Some kings need to be fought, abandoned, or killed…but they should be replaced with good ones.

 

• Recognition that authoritarianism isn’t a synonym for, tyranny, despotism, etc. As well as recognition that authoritarianism doesn’t necessarily mean monarchy, inherited aristocracy, etc. (As well as some recalculations of whether those are good or bad, and how.) Authoritarianism just means liberties and responsibilities descend from authority, for real.

 

• Respect is impossible to derive from freedom itself. If we’re all merely free to do or say this or that, then from whence can respect come? It’s just, like, your opinion, man. This is a big one.

Liberty on the Fringes of Jane’s Books

Oscar writes:

Freedom – more correctly, liberty – is not the ability to do whatever one wants, which is what most people today think it is.

The ability to do whatever one wants is not liberty, it’s hedonism. Hedonism is what “liberals” want. They don’t actually want liberty.

Liberty is the ability to govern oneself. The implication being that one who does not govern himself must be governed by others.

To paraphrase Federalist 55, when men possess insufficient virtue to govern themselves, nothing short of the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.

Questions:

1. Who decides what is virtue? Who really decides–leaving some alone but punishing others–whether or not a man governs himself? Whoever that person is, he is the authority under which the others live. Christians should not believe that the answer is only “God”. Our scriptures tell us that we are to obey not only God, but several authorities who He has given the mission to rule.
2. What does the author of Federalist 55 mean by govern except to be under control; under authority? Does he think destroyers and devourers are not making their own choices?

What Oscar calls Liberty just is Authority; the permission to act within certain boundaries of responsibility. Liberty is the bit within the boundaries. Most of the world is outside those boundaries.

We can test this. Pick up one copy of each of the 77 Jane’s Information Group books. (Here is a list.) Separate them into two piles: one pile with the things an adult American citizen with no criminal history but without special licenses is allowed to own and use. Put the rest in another pile of the those which are forbidden him without special license. Those piles will contain 0 books, and 77 books, respectively.

Ok, now take those books, and tear out the pages. (This will take some time. There will be a lot of them.) Separate those pages into piles according to the same criteria. This will now put some pages in the Allowed pile, but the vast majority will be in the Forbidden pile.

Those piles constitute what is meant by: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” 

When I point out that what we want is Authoritarianism, there’s no reason for clear observers and thinkers to be scared. It’s what we have right now. We lie about it because we have been taught by Liberals to be afraid of it. But lying is utterly corrosive, and not at all manly or godly.

It gets even better: Liberals are afraid of it! Things that Liberals are afraid of should be go-to weapons.

CoE IV: Leave

For a long time I maintained that men should continue to go to church. I still believe that for men in churches that aren’t hostile to men, who support and encourage him to take authority over his family, and who encourage wives and children to obey their husbands and fathers. Churches and pastors are bound to do and say silly things now and then. They will say things that you won’t like, or give different interpretations to Biblical text than you see.

But undermining a father’s authority–his right and responsibility to lead–by deed (example) and by voice (command)–is destructive of the whole organization.

You can’t fight the leadership of an organization. Even if you win, the organization will probably die when its leaders are gone. You see this in families. After a divorce families altogether fall apart. That’s why so many parents tell the lie to their kids that “The divorce isn’t about them (the children), and that Mommy and Daddy both still love them very much.” Children discover the lie when Mommy and/or Daddy remarry and have new children with their new spouse. The children of the new marriage are loved more. There’s simply more love to give because that fountain still flows. Or when the new couple go off to have fun together without the children from the old marriage. Or when unknown and untrusted adults are brought into the home of children to go off and make strange noises in the parent’s bedroom, and later sit, frighteningly, at the breakfast table. That is, if they don’t come and go in the night like a thief.

It can be a good thing for an organization to die, but you don’t want to be in it when it happens. And you don’t want to be a traitor. Treason hurts the traitor as much or more than the betrayed in the long run. No one should trust a traitor even if he claims to have acted for the right cause. It’s a worse thing to act in bad faith than it is make a wrong choice. That is disrespect and contempt for yourself, those around you, and those above you; for everyone. Those who make bad decisions can be convinced and even repent. They can change their minds and heal their souls. Those who act in bad faith lose both.

So if you find yourself at odds with the leadership, and they undermine your authority, and they don’t defend you as you carry out your God-appointed duty to have charge over your family: Leave.

[Edit: Edited to fix an editing error. Edit.]

You Can Drive When I’m Dead

Driving Miss Crazy demonstrates (I hope) the unfairness of our situation. A woman does sometimes try to grab the wheel of the car we’re to drive; yet it is his car, and he is in the driver’s seat. When that happens, the only wise thing to do is stop the car, right then, and tell her that his car goes where he wants and it is literally in his hands. She is welcome to come along. She is encouraged to come along. But she should never try to steer the car.

Sometimes he might ask her to hold the wheel on course for moment while he digs something out of his pocket, but that it will never happen while he needs to make a change in direction.

A wise man won’t give up the wheel too often because his wife will being to wonder who is driving this thing? And if she can do it well this far, maybe better progress will be made. Why, if she’s competent to steer with one hand for a moment, how much better could the trip go if she used both as much as she wanted?

If that happens: Stop the car. Don’t wrestle over control. Don’t try to fight her. Don’t wait until the car crashes to prove you were right. Stop the damn car. You go no further until she agrees to keep her hands off the wheel.

What do I mean by “stop the car”? It means nothing else gets done before the steering conflict is resolved. It means don’t talk about anything else until the conflict is resolved: No bills, no budget, no extra-curricular activities, no lawn, no trash, no in-laws, no Daddy Time with the kids. All those things are “driving the car” of a father’s life, and none of them are safe while the wrong person thinks she’s driving the car.

She may get out. Tell her she should get back in. Do not start driving until she agrees to keep her hands off the wheel.

She may not get back in. Roll on, slowly at first, but after a time she either will or won’t and you have to keep moving.

If she grabs the wheel again, stop the damn car again. Never allow the car to go while she fights for control of the car. After you die, then she can drive.